Last week, my reflections were guided by Charlie Munger’s favorite mental model: inversion.
Rather than asking how to design a good life, the question was simpler and sterner: What does a bad life look like—and how might we avoid it?
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The Philosophical Investor's Blog
How I Won a Tennis Tournament by Doing Less, Not More
by 
Gary Carmell
Gary Carmell
I recently won my first doubles tennis tournament in a few years. This was the most satisfying because we won four matches on three surfaces, with one of the battles being quite challenging, requiring a come-from-behind victory.
It took longer than I expected—and probably longer than I wanted—but in retrospect,
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A Date with Success
by Gary Carmell
Gary Carmell
“Watch out, you might get what you’re after.”
The line floats through Burning Down the House almost as a warning—half playful, half ominous. I’ve heard it countless times, usually sung along to without much thought. But lately, it’s been echoing differently.
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Playing in Our Own Plays
by Gary Carmell
Gary Carmell
Barcelona, the zoo, clay courts, and the art of living awake
We were in Barcelona—intentionally and accidentally at the same time.
Heather and I arrived after spending the prior week at the Rolex Monte‑Carlo Open,
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Trade-Offs in Monte Carlo
by Gary Carmell
Gary Carmell
Sometimes the Place Trumps the Play
On Trade‑Offs, Tennis, and the Economics of Time
Thomas Sowell famously defined economics not as money, markets, or math, but as the allocation of scarce resources that have alternative uses.
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The Mind Is in Every Cell — An Investor’s Reflection
by Gary Carmell
Gary Carmell
After finishing listening to Sound Man on Audible, which is a book I highly recommend for music lovers, it cycles through snippets of other books the algorithm thinks I might like. One of those books was The Uncool by Cameron Crowe.
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Pattern Recognition Is Not Prophecy
by Gary Carmell
Gary Carmell
On Energy, Empire, and the Seductive Power of Coherent Stories
One of the most intoxicating human capacities is pattern recognition.
It is the engine of intelligence, the source of insight, and the reason we survive complexity at all. But it is also the birthplace of our most confident errors—especially when patterns begin to feel inevitable.
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Houston - Gaining Energy?
by Gary Carmell
Gary Carmell
Last week was quite busy, so for this post, I decided to turn to Copilot to help me produce the output. Over the past year, our acquisitions at CWS have been heavily concentrated on properties in the Houston area. Of course,
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Hot and Hotter
by Gary Carmell
Gary Carmell
I wanted to return to the subject of housing and share some of the latest graphs related to the single-family and multifamily markets. I’ll start with the single-family sector.
Demand continues to be strong but it has decelerated from the torrid Covid-catalyzed pace of 2020.
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How To Find Satisfaction in Retirement
by Gary Carmell
Gary Carmell
With the baby boomers starting to descend down the other side of the hill with millions soon following, retirement planning has understandably become not only very important but big business as well. Most of what future retirees and financial advisors focus on are how to prepare financially so that not only can people have the choice to retire but once they do they don’t outlive their money.
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